Explore 1.5M+ audiobooks & ebooks free for days

From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Saving the Day: The Curators, #1
Saving the Day: The Curators, #1
Saving the Day: The Curators, #1
Ebook407 pages5 hoursThe Curators

Saving the Day: The Curators, #1

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

From the acclaimed author of the Tube Riders series comes a new dystopian series set in London ... Saving the Day.

Simon Ester is a broken man. Unable to support his family, he travels to the industrial wasteland of London and manages to get himself on a work crew breaking up hulks. As time passes, he becomes aware of a mysterious place known only as the Bridge, where humans have a better lot than those scrapping to survive in the city, and makes it his aim to get there.

However, the Bridge is not what it seems, and is only the beginning of Simon's nightmare, as, piece by piece, he uncovers a hidden world, one in which humanity may no longer be the dominant species....

LanguageEnglish
PublisherAMMFA Publishing
Release dateJun 27, 2019
ISBN9781393853237
Saving the Day: The Curators, #1
Read preview
Author

Chris Ward

Chris Ward lleva escribiendo más de treinta años. Es el autor de más de una decena de novelas que se han publicado. Escribe, sobre todo, dentro del género de la ficción especulativa. Es de Reino Unido pero, en estos momentos, vive y trabaja en Japón.

Other titles in Saving the Day Series (1)

View More

Read more from Chris Ward

Related to Saving the Day

Titles in the series (1)

View More

Related ebooks

Science Fiction For You

View More

Related categories

Reviews for Saving the Day

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Saving the Day - Chris Ward

    Prologue

    I dream of a life among liquids. Rushing water and hot, sticky blood, and the cheap, scorching alcohol I used to drown it all out. Sometimes I’m falling, bundling over and over in the churning whitewater, caught in an endless, airless torrent. Other times I wake to find blood on my fingertips, slick over the old scars, my body soaked not with gritty, chilled river water but with my own sweat.

    I think of Roger Hartley more than I’d like, the grin on his face present and then gone. He haunts me in death as he once did in life. Zone One and Zone Two, the names as simple as two warehouses, but the contents being the white and black halves of a human soul.

    And worst of all, I think of the girl.

    Of Allie.

    Some nights I find sleep impossible. I sit on the edge of my bed, the dirt floor under my bare feet, and I hold my head in my hands, gritting my teeth to keep the screams inside.

    I try never to think of my family, what little I remember.

    I like to think of Allie first, of the good times, the few that there were. Even as the dark clouds gathered she would wrinkle her nose as she smiled, taking me away from those dark, prison-like walls to somewhere brighter, a field of wildflowers in a mountain valley pushing away the looming dark.

    Like a candle snuffed out by gnarled, callused fingers, Allie’s spark is brief, replaced all too soon by the thundercloud, the darkness, and the rain. Tears spring to my eyes and my hands shake so badly that I don’t dare try to lift the cup the boy brings for me in case that whole nightmarish train comes rolling home, the story painted in blood on the side panels of the trucks as they pass.

    The passage of time is like a river, uncountable. I don’t remember when it started, but it started with the Bridge.

    Part I

    The City

    1

    Leavetaking

    It was a plague that we should have seen coming. The beating of pestilent wings came from the entrance to every major corporation as the workers left in droves.

    They called it downsizing.

    We called it selling off our lives for profit.

    My name is Simon Ester. I programmed internal control systems in a car factory, a tiring job with long hours, but one that provided for my family.

    Until the day it was taken away.

    ‘This way, please.’

    The pleasantry was arbitrary. I had no choice. The man wearing the work overalls over a sharply pressed suit had a wrinkleless face that suggested he had never smiled. His eyes were as cold as the grey of his tie.

    It made me think of winter. Outside, it was still spring, but the great and endless winter of my life was about to begin.

    In a room so small it was nearly insulting, a man I knew as my boss waited. I had never spoken to him face to face, just listened to him over a public address or from the back of a crowd. As others had left, their places taken by machines, I could only surmise that his audience had dwindled so much that a desk nobody like myself had found his way to the front.

    ‘Take a seat, Mr. Ester.’

    ‘Yes, sir? What did you want to see me about?’

    He was small and wiry, his sky dry and brittle over bones as if he hadn’t eaten well in decades. When he grimaced, his face crunched into the ugly visage of a demon about to ruin the rest of my life.

    ‘We’re letting you go,’ he said. ‘It’s not personal. You understand that, don’t you? It’s simple economics. We’re downsizing.’

    I nodded. What else could I do?

    ‘I wish there was any other way, Simon, really I did. But for the company to survive….’

    My eyes had already fallen to the floor before I heard the man who had brought me opening the door to let me out.

    In the days to follow all I would remember was the sound of doors closing.

    I only saw my replacement once, in a catalogue thrown into a pedal bin lined up along the back wall of the company I had hoped would employ me until retirement.

    A 379-G Programming Companion. It was basically a silver box with a human face tacked on for decoration. The cost was three years of my salary, thirty years of my life. The company considered it a fair trade.

    I didn’t know how I would tell Madeline and the kids that the life they had always known was over.

    She cried. A reasonable reaction, I supposed. Families were moving out all along our street. She must have expected it, but even so. That final blow hurt.

    ‘I’ll get another job,’ I promised. ‘They gave me good references, and the payoff will last several months.’

    I wondered if she could hear the echo in my hollow words.

    She kissed me, her lovely eyes close to my own. I would try to remember them in the days to come.

    The curve of the downward spiral was so wide I never saw it coming until I was locked into freefall. Her father, a hard man who had paid his dues in the years before, took us in, but the rot had already begun. Madeline’s family lived in a nothing town on the edge of one of the exclusion zones, with no work to be found. Her father’s money would only extend so far and without a job I was just another mouth to feed, another pile of clothes to wash, another body to keep warm during the chilling nights. When the payoff was gone, I walked before I was pushed, holding my children one final time as my wife stood beside her father at the gate.

    ‘I’ll call when I’ve got something,’ I said. ‘I’ll set up a bank transfer, and once I can come back, I will. I promise. I love you.’

    Her father looked at the ground. Madeline gave me a shy smile, as if we’d only just met. My children, Lawrence and Kate, stared at me like two people from a different country, my words alien. I wondered if I would ever see them again. The kind of jobs I might have to take wouldn’t give me enough money for both a place to stay and a visit home. I had heard the rumours of the cities, but I had just hidden from them behind the desk of my comfortable job. Now, like a fresh wound, I was exposed.

    ‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘I love you.’

    I wished there was something more useful I could have said.

    2

    Queues

    The blare of the bus’s horn shook me awake. For a moment I had no clue where I was, and reached out for the seat beside me, searching for some form of comfort, but finding nothing but the leg of another man who glared at me out of a hard, suspicious face.

    Getting down from the bus was like stepping out of a long, tiring dream. I had a headache to end all headaches, and from the look of the other passengers, I wasn’t alone. Had this been the first day of my life, I couldn’t have been more surprised. Around me dozens of other buses kicked up dust in a vast dirt parking lot, snaking lines of men with bags slung over their shoulders heading for an open gate in the tall chain link fence that surrounded the bus park.

    We had stopped atop a rise. From the gate a dirt road meandered down a gentle slope, and in the distance I got my first glimpse of London. Once our nation’s most glorious city, now it was a sprawling industrial wasteland painted in blacks and greys, a depressing pencil drawing of failure. A sea of human detritus choked its streets in silent rebellion against the silver boxes which had stolen their lives, while the towers of the new world rose up around them like dead, oil-covered trees.

    I put a hand into my pocket, feeling the cloth separate as if it hadn’t been touched in a long, long time. I pulled out a handful of cash, and a dulled bank card I hoped would still work. I had no great expectations. All I wanted was to find somewhere to stay and some kind of work before my money ran out. Machines might have a monopoly on everything technical, but there was still construction or hauling garbage, cleaning, road maintenance, the kind of jobs we might once have pushed on horses or oxen, but for which now men would scrap and fight over the chance to pull a bridle over their heads.

    The temporary buildings of employment agencies began to appear like squat grey beetles just outside the city limits. Unsure what to expect, I joined the first queue I came to and stood in line with other sour-faced men while the factory towers of the city belched and wheezed in the distance, plumes of grey smoke staining the sky.

    In front of me stood a man with oil stained cheeks. Other men wore sweaty trousers and t-shirts. I wore jeans and a check shirt, a bandana tied over my head to keep the sweat out of my eyes. I held a bag at my side. I could no longer remember what I’d packed, but it felt light, as if it contained no more than a couple of changes of clothes.

    I had just settled in for a long wait when the man in front of me turned around and poked me in the chest. I took a step back, staring at him as he looked me up and down like a farmer assessing a head of cattle.

    ‘Where you come from and what you looking for?’ he said, lips soiled with cold sores lifting over browned, crooked teeth.

    ‘Car computer systems,’ I said. ‘And I’m looking for anything.’

    ‘Best way,’ he said. Then, answering the question I hadn’t asked, added, ‘Me, I came from insurance. Them computers you built put me out of work, you cunt.’

    I tensed, ready for a fight, the first, I expected, of many. The man just laughed. ‘Messing with you, mate. Down with the Thins and the Cleans, that’s what I say. Those mothers screwed the lot of us.’

    I nodded even though I had no idea what he meant. Thinking we were done, I started to turn away. The fist struck me so hard the world blurred. My legs trembled and I crashed to the ground as a roar rose up around me, burning with fires of resentment, anger, and outrage.

    ‘Look at you with your smug grin and your clean clothes!’ Oil-face hollered at me from the sky far above as hands reached out to hold him back. ‘Look at you with your ‘I’m-going-places’ attitude. This is your first line, ain’t it? You think what’s up there is a job and a life, damn you. You have no idea.’

    A man behind me helped me up as Oil-face was pushed a few spaces further up the queue. I heard him shouting at someone else and knew I was already forgotten, just another rudely hopeful face that had appeared out of the crowd. I rubbed and stretched my jaw. It wasn’t broken but it would hurt to eat for a couple of days, if indeed I was lucky enough to find food.

    ‘You all right?’ someone asked behind me, an older man with a stringy beard and a mop of ash-grey hair framing a sunburned face.

    ‘If I say yes will you thump me as well?’ I muttered, still rubbing my jaw.

    The man laughed. ‘I need these hands, boy. You’re safe. Name’s Wayne North, as in not south. You?’

    ‘Simon Ester. Easter without the A.’

    ‘Dainty, if that were still a thing. Where’d you come from?’

    I paused. The punch seemed to have knocked out my senses. As my thoughts came back to me, I said, ‘Manchester.’

    ‘Huh. Work’s all gone up there too?’

    ‘Most of it.’

    Wayne North stuck out a gnarly hand. ‘Welcome to the one percent. Too many of us, not enough work to go round. They should have thought about all this before they let us be born.’

    I shook his hand, feeling the stub of a missing ring finger. ‘There really work in there or have I wasted my journey?’

    North shrugged. ‘So they said. I heard they’s culling in the west, so here’s as best a place as any.’

    In front of me, the queue had shuffled forward, and I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. I looked up into the eyes of a tall black man with a gun slung across his chest. ‘You’re next. Hurry up.’

    He pushed me towards the nearest hut, a metal rectangle that had once been a cargo container, the front cut out and lined with desks. The man sitting behind the closest one was pasty white and overfed, his jowly chin billowing in the wind of an electric fan on the floor behind his desk.

    I sat down on a metal-framed chair across from him.

    ‘Name?’

    ‘Simon Ester.’

    ‘Occupation?’

    ‘Car computer systems engineer. Or at least I was—’

    He stuck up a hand without looking up from the papers in front of him. ‘Just answer the questions, please. Have you seen the queue?’

    ‘I stood in it for two hours.’

    ‘Lucky you. Other skills?’

    I frowned. ‘Woodwork, carpentry. Amateur, but—’

    ‘Can you make rope?’

    ‘No, but—’

    ‘Cut sheet metal?’

    ‘No—’

    ‘Break up aggregate?’

    ‘I—’

    His pen fell against the metal table with a sharp crack.

    ‘What use are you to me, Mr. Ester?’

    I took a long slow breath, resisting the urge to slam a fist into the pasty man’s face. ‘I’m strong,’ I said. ‘I can lift, I can drag, I can carry. I can clean and I can work from dawn to dusk without a break. I have a family. My own life is nothing if I cannot provide for theirs.’

    The pasty-faced man looked up at me for the first time, and a smile broke through the marshmallow putty of his cheeks. ‘You could be just what we’re looking for, Mr. Ester. Congratulations, you might even be bridge-bound.’

    He turned to a small laptop and began clicking away. I didn’t ask what he meant about this bridge place for fear of my resentment towards his attitude showing itself too clearly. Instead I just stared at the posters on the wall behind him, of smiling workers waving at the camera from construction sites which the cleanliness of the men’s clothes and faces gave away as fake.

    Pasty-face snapped the laptop shut and reached down to take a printout from under the desk. He folded it in half and thrust it across the desk at me, together with a smaller blue piece of paper with a red stamp on it.

    ‘Docks, haulage. Pay’s crap but it’ll keep you alive. Where you live is your problem. The blue paper will get you through the fence into the city. Lose it and you’re back in the queues, but you’re on the system now.’ He tapped the closed laptop with one overlong fingernail. ‘Not many second chances going around.’

    ‘Thanks.’

    Pasty-face grinned. ‘You’re welcome. Good luck in there.’

    Feeling anything but enthusiastic, I forced a smile. ‘Thanks.’

    3

    Disorder

    The sprawling shanty town of work agencies, cheap bars, and cheaper hotels had grown up outside a thirty-foot bright blue fence erected outside the official city boundary. As I stood in line to have my pass checked, I saw groups of sweaty men working at intervals along the structure, painting over the metal frame where the blue paint had begun to chip and peel, keeping it as fresh as a pristine snake slithering its way through the chaos.

    Armed guards waited up ahead, beside a thin gate only large enough for one person at a time. Through the mess of buildings I caught sight of a larger gate for vehicles half a mile to the west, the guards in black uniforms buzzing around the queuing cars and trucks like flies around a corpse.

    With the sun so bright, all I could do was stare at my dirty shoes or the lines of men still waiting in employment queues to either side. Each time someone left the shade of one of the huts they would either turn with a grim smile towards the line waiting to enter the city, or scowl and head in the direction of the nearest bars. Some ranted and raved, others wiped desperate tears from their eyes. Guards mingled through the crowd to keep order, and with a wry smile I wondered how I might get one of those jobs.

    ‘Next. Move along, please.’

    I looked up at the guard waving me forward towards the gate. I showed him the blue paper. He nodded and indicated a circle on the ground for me to stand inside and then proceeded to check through my bag.

    ‘I don’t have any weapons,’ I said.

    ‘We’re not after weapons,’ the guard answered, glaring at me with bloodshot eyes that suggested he fought daily against demons of his own. ‘Okay, you’re good. Through you go.’

    Beside the gate was a wire basket full of strange electronic devices, many of which I had never seen before. Some were radios, others computer tablets. I recalled using such things in my job, but these looked shiny and modern, far removed from the clunky, cumbersome ones with which I was familiar.

    ‘Move!’ the guard shouted, and the butt of a gun prodded me in the back. I stepped forward, under the shining blue fence, and out the other side into London.

    A few feet inside I dropped my bag to adjust the straps and turned to look back. The fence, so impressive on the outside, was from the inside a wall of brown rust, flecked with blue only in places where the paint had splashed through the chain links from the other side. Beyond it, the milling crowd of desperate men reminded me of a prison, a concentration camp, a hell at the end of the world.

    ‘No! I can do it, I swear to you!’

    The cry had come up from a work queue not far from the fence, in a voice I recognised. I walked a short way from the gate, out of sight of the guards, and pushed my face against the wire, peering out.

    Oil-face was standing inside a work office. This one was older and even more decrepit than the others, stinking of last-chance saloon. A thin man wearing spectacles cowered behind a desk as Oil-face slammed a fist on the metal desktop and then shoved the man’s laptop to the ground as guards came running up behind him.

    ‘Who are you to tell me I can’t work! I’ve never missed a day in my life!’

    ‘Back off!’ a guard shouted, leveling his gun at Oil-face, who threw his hands up into the air. ‘Come out of there!’

    Oil-face, still protesting, started to back out of the office, then spun and grabbed the barrel of the gun, twisting it away from his chest.

    The gun went off, and someone nearby screamed and crashed to the dirt. Oil-face howled, pulling his hand off the gun barrel, his palm red and burning from the heat of the discharge. The guard spun towards him, but Oil-face sidestepped and threw his good hand into the guard’s face, knocking him to his knees.

    Then he turned and ran, the crowd parting around him.

    It looked for a moment that he might get away as he raced along the fence, muscled arms pumping hard. Then two guards stepped out of the crowd in front, leveled their guns and shot him down. Oil-face gave one last gasping cry, fell to his knees and then dropped face down in the dirt.

    The two guards walked up to Oil-face’s fallen body. One put the barrel of his gun to the back of Oil-face’s head and pulled the trigger. The other called to a group of nearby men cowering back out of the way, and ordered them to pick up the body.

    When no one moved, he shouted, ‘Four of you get a permanent job.’

    Five men broke from the line. The first four grabbed a limb each. The fifth hovered uncertainly until the guard waved him back into the line with a jerk of his gun. He retreated, hands over his sobbing face, distraught at a missed opportunity.

    The guard Oil-face had punched climbed to his feet and approached the others. They conversed quietly, and then started to wave the still-gaping workers back into their lines.

    I was still staring through the chain links when one of them noticed me. I reached down for my bag and started to back away, but his gun was leveled and I felt a rising fear that kept my feet from moving.

    Through the fence, the guard glared at me out of cold eyes beneath the white helmet he wore. I looked away for just a second, at the gash on his cheek where Oil-face’s punch had landed. Beneath the blood something silvery glimmered, like glittery fish beneath the surface of the sea.

    ‘Look forward, not back,’ the guard said. ‘It would be wise for you to go now.’

    I didn’t wait for him to speak again. I grabbed my bag, turned and headed into the city, away from one layer of madness, into another.

    4

    Lodgings

    The crowds were much thinner inside the city limits. The nearest buildings to the fence were abandoned industrial holdings, but after a few minutes of walking among grey warehouses, fenced off dumping grounds for everything from television sets to cars, and past a couple of overgrown parks filled with more litter than grass, the first rows of normality—houses, shops, even a school—began to appear.

    I started to see the signs too, some plunged crookedly into the grass verges beside the roads, others held up by men with grinning faces, one or two by children with hollow cheeks and distracted gazes. All of them offered the same thing: lodgings for new workers.

    After what I had seen outside the fence I wasn’t in a trusting mood, so I ignored the first barrage, passing off those who wouldn’t be dissuaded by a wave of my hand with the insistence that I already had something lined up. The truth was that I was starving, having not eaten since alighting from the bus hours earlier. I had some food in my bag, but too many people I saw looked hungry, so it was unlikely I would be able to eat anywhere public without being hassled for handouts.

    I turned off the main thoroughfare from the gate as soon as I could, heading into quieter residential streets that without graffiti, dirty stains on the walls and the occasional boarded-up window, would have looked respectable. At a confluence of two converging streets I wandered into a deserted square lined by spiked railings, and sat on the edge of a dry fountain to collect my thoughts.

    Barely had I sat down when a commotion rose from the end of the street heading east away from the square. I crept over to a stand of bushes near to the railings on that side to observe what was happening.

    An old truck, utterly devoid of paint except for an ugly black smear across the hood, chugged down the street, leaning precariously to the left on one flat tire. A man was visible at the wheel through the broken windscreen, and three men stood up in the truck’s open back.

    Two of them held guns.

    ‘There’s safety in numbers, friends,’ boomed a voice from a loud speaker roped to the truck’s radiator grill. ‘Safety in the shadows below the Bridge. If you’re better than the rest, if you have the skills to pass the test, come hither! Take the initiation today!’

    To the right a house door banged back against its hinges and a thin shadow darted out. A woman appeared in the doorway, screaming, ‘No, Dwight! Come back!’

    Dwight ignored her. He dashed out into the street as the woman continued to protest, over to the truck’s side where one of the men leaned out to help him up. As a series of whoops came from the men in the back as they high-fived with Dwight, the driver pushed the nose of a gun out of the broken windscreen and leveled it at the house Dwight had abandoned.

    ‘Ye heathen mother! Unholy welcomer of machines!’ came the roar from the loud speaker, then the woman’s screams were drowned as a burst of machine gun fire sent lumps of masonry spitting out from the walls. The woman dived back through the door, followed by a cackle of amplified laughter.

    The truck moved on down the street with its new recruit entrenched in the back. I ducked back into the bushes, trying to stay out of sight as it reached the square and lumbered its way around it. I looked up as it pulled away, and for a brief instant I caught the gaze of one of the men in the back.

    As I shrank back into the bushes he lifted a hand and tapped a finger against the side of his forehead, a gesture that told me two things:

    You know.

    You’re dead.

    Both were equally appropriate.

    As the sound of the truck faded into the distance, I headed out of the square and down the road that the truck had come from. The woman had re-emerged from the house with an elderly man in tow, and was crying into her hand as she pointed out the gunshots on the wall.

    I dropped my gaze and walked on.

    Lying in the gutter a few steps ahead was a piece of paper. I picked it up, turning it over in my hands.

    It was a propaganda leaflet dropped from the truck. On one side it said: The Bridge is your savior; on the other: The machines are death, the Bridge is life! Do you have what we need?

    Bridge was written with a capital B. A crude picture of a robot had been crossed out with red marker pen, while another of a suspension bridge had been ringed with a heart-shape. I tossed it away and glanced over my shoulder. The woman and the man had gone back inside.

    What was this

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 20